The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  Their third blackout occurred when they tried to kiss each other on the cheek in a university hallway. After waiting for them to come around, a medical student who had witnessed the scene checked their vital signs and advised them to consult a specialist, which they did the following week. The doctors were hard put to offer an explanation other than a mysterious form of simultaneous epilepsy, a hypothesis that none of the test results supported. On paper they appeared to be absolutely normal.

  The fainting spells grew less frequent and less intense only when they began to make love. When they moved in together a few months after the first episode the manifestations of their amorous epilepsy entirely vanished. But traces of it remained each time they touched, however slightly. A sort of quivering that stirred their cells like a tiny, invisible earthquake.

  “The strong showing early on in the campaign makes it hard not to see Ariel Goldstein as the Labour Party’s long-awaited saviour,” the radio voice murmurs from the four cardinal points. “Will this be enough for the party to take back the reins of government, which have eluded it for twenty years? Canadians have three more weeks to decide.”

  Marc turns the receiver off with a wave of his hand and silence descends like a curtain all around them. He raises his glass:

  “To our saviour!”

  The gathering erupts in laughter and then follows his lead. Seeing the former military man make such a lighthearted toast has lifted everyone’s spirits. For the small team that has been working without letup since the election was called, this friendly brunch is like a break in the clouds. Ariel looks proudly at each one of them and, though he would never admit it, feels relieved to have them by his side. Thanks to them the beginner’s blunders that the National Party was counting on never occurred. During his first weeks in the House of Commons he was able to consolidate his reputation and increase his support among voters. After the election campaign was launched his confidence grew. Working a crowd, mixing with “ordinary folks”—that is what he does best, and he knows it.

  To his right, Marie’s head is spinning and her thoughts are buoyant. She is not in the habit of drinking wine before noon, but something in the room’s geometry, in the colour of the walls and the perfectly cooked pumpkin soufflé prompts her to overdo it. Marc and Emmanuelle’s home is the picture of perfection. The house, standing on the slopes of Mount Royal, the minimalist furniture, their hi-tech sound system, and the organic champagne are at once extravagant and sublimely necessary.

  “Shit!” the publicist blurts out, disrupting the tranquil mood of the meal. “The evangelist media have fished out some Biblical passages warning against the arrival of an ungodly prophet. It’s all over the blogs.”

  “Because Ariel is Jewish? That’s ridiculous! No one’s going to take it seriously!” Emmanuelle exclaims.

  “Not in your progressive bubble, no. But in the rest of the world, absolutely,” Marc snaps back.

  Marie gets up and steps toward the window. Their hosts’ altercations weary her. She knows how fond Ariel is of Marc, but Emmanuelle, the fiery artist, makes her uncomfortable. She can’t understand their way of behaving more like adversaries than lovers or their tendency to lock horns in public. Whenever the subject is politics, Marc attacks Emmanuelle; she, on the other hand, takes pains to appear utterly ingenuous, as if she were honour-bound to remain ignorant of the world her husband is part of.

  Evidently delighted at finding an excuse to leave the table, Emmanuelle goes to join Marie at the window.

  “Election campaigns—they’re such a nuisance, don’t you think? You must miss Ariel…”

  Marie, her thoughts scattered around her, agrees. She desperately misses Ariel. But what she hasn’t the strength to explain to Emmanuelle is that she misses him even when she accompanies him to party events, even when she appears beside him as they climb down from the campaign bus, when she hands him a pastry offered by a pro-Labour shop owner, or when she listens to him rehearsing a new speech. To find herself alone with him, by the sea or at a lake, far from everything—that is what she’d like. Nighttime, of course, is still theirs, the opaque cloth where they nestle for a few hours before going out into the world again, but it’s not enough. Marie would like to dig wells, tunnels, underground warrens, to dive down into the depths of their love and resurface, breathless, holding in their hands a treasure or an unknown animal. But the campaign monopolizes everything.

  After standing next to Marie for a while munching on grapes, Emmanuelle goes away, no doubt vexed by the other’s silence. Marie contemplates the landscape spread out below the house. Seen from this angle, the city always makes her feel slightly dizzy. Thousands of dogs and their owners stroll along the paths of Mount Royal, carving ruts into the mountain’s back. Canada geese execute Pythagorean manoeuvres in preparation for their departure. The St. Lawrence rumbles like an ogre. Centimetre by centimetre it eats away at the banks. Soon the city will be nothing but a vast bed for a sterile river. Each time she thinks about the rising waters, Marie wants to cry. Ariel comes over and wraps her in his arms.

  “We’ll learn to breathe under water,” he whispers.

  Nothing in Canada is colder than a Northern Ontario highway in the middle of the night. It’s already winter here. A thin, chalky sheet covers the roadway, where the wind is etching scraggly arabesques. With rhythmic regularity, the icy brightness from the lampposts bleaches the interior of the election campaign bus, a light so harsh it seems audible to Ariel, a caustic whistle close to his ear.

  The convoy has already been travelling for six hours. The team is scheduled to reach Kapuskasing at dawn for a tour of a former mine that has been converted into a movie theatre. Because many towns in the region have been closed down over the past few decades, Ariel must reassure the residents, although the bulky folder he is studying provides no reason to be hopeful. He sighs. Around him, Marc and the other advisers are drowsing, their bodies bent in ridiculous postures. Sitting in his huge velvet seat at the front of the vehicle, the driver is invisible. The bus might as well be driving itself.

  Through the window, a few moribund hamlets can be seen flashing by with a feeble glow and some wisps of smoke. Misery has nowhere to hide here, nor do Ariel’s thoughts. It is far easier to be persuaded one can change things when sitting in Ottawa or Montreal or Toronto. But in the light of these areas left behind by progress and stripped of the amenities they were promised, their decline appears to be unstoppable. Ariel searches almost haphazardly through the database prepared by his team. Despite all the serious research that has been done on poverty-related issues, nothing has gotten to the heart of the matter; no term, no definition is close enough, straightforward enough, incisive enough.

  He stands up and shakes out his stiff limbs. The convoy enters an unlit stretch of road, and it’s as if the bus had plunged into deep water and were diving toward an abyss where heavy, fearful fossils lie sleeping. As slowly as a mime, Ariel passes his hand in front of his colleagues’ faces to verify that they are indeed asleep. He smiles at the childhood trick. Then he tiptoes to the back of the vehicle, where a private nook has been set up for him. His personal effects are there: the old Andreï Markov sweater, his lucky charm, a biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau that his father gave him a few days ago, and a slim, triangular case. Smiling, he pops open the clasps, which crack like two tiny whips. Nestled inside the padded box is a miniature guitar. A gift received from Marie at the start of the tour. To stave off boredom while you’re on the road. So you don’t lose your way, the card said.

  Ariel lovingly lifts the delicate instrument out of its case and presses his tired lips against the neck of the guitar. The kiss leaves a taste of varnish that pricks his tongue. Then, ensconced in his seat, he strokes the strings, muting the sound so as not to wake anyone. A melody rises in a minor key, the scale that never finds happiness yet does not despair.

  Marie shuts the door of her childhood room, which has become t
he realm of Frère Jacques, her parents’ malamute. She flops down beside the animal, which is sleeping on the rug, stroking its fur as thick as stalks of strong, nourishing grain, inhaling its rich scent. As far back as she can recall, her family has always had malamutes. A hardy, loyal, dignified breed, embodying all that the Leclercs value. Marie buries her nose in the salt-and-pepper pelt; the dog moans blissfully. She has an urge to whisper one or two secrets into the dog’s dense coat, or even to shout, but she contents herself with kissing it.

  The little room with a sloping ceiling has remained untouched since she left some fifteen years ago. Whenever she visits it, Marie relives her childhood in reverse, starting with the morning she packed her bags, at once terrified and euphoric at the thought of leaving her home town for McGill University, where her life would finally take flight. Then her adolescence streams by, dreary and terrible; she sees herself bent over her schoolbooks, cloistered in the school environment, the one sphere in which she allowed herself a certain lack of moderation, the one place where she could excel without drawing attention to herself. She contemplates the spectral presence of the Lego cities she built with Rachel, and that of the dolls she would create on Sunday afternoons, little papier-mâché figurines to which she poured out her heart when it was brimming over. She stretches out on the bed, wrapped in the particular atmosphere of a room where one has lived long enough to experience boredom, that blend of living dust and dead time.

  The walk from the car to her parents’ front door tired her out. There were reporters waiting for them, Ariel and her, in front of the house. It took her father’s stentorian voice to open a path through the throng clustered under the large maples in the front yard. Martial greeted his daughter with a hug. Ever since she was a child, it’s in moments like this that their relationship has acquired a little substance: Marie having a difficult time, Martial protecting her. Otherwise the fragile little girl and the larger-than-life man repel each other like inverted magnets, she, frightened by him, he, too clumsy to reassure her.

  “Are they ever going to leave us alone, those people?” Hortense shouted from the kitchen. “We already had it up to here with our computer being repeatedly broken into! Sixteen hours it took for your father’s geeks to get the company’s network up and running again.”

  From the back of the dining room Rachel stood up to speak, her silhouette rearing up as if a Greek column had suddenly been planted in the room.

  “Mother, I’ll say it again: the hacking has nothing to do with Ariel’s new position. It happened before and will happen again.”

  Rachel is in charge of operations in the family business and has kept an eye on all the hacking incidents; she had already confided to Marie that the frequency of these intrusions had doubled since the beginning of the election campaign. Thankful for this little lie, Marie abandoned herself to the smothering embraces of her sister and mother amid the boisterous barking of Frère Jacques.

  As is always the case at the Leclerc residence, the meal was an expeditious affair carried out in a series of quasi-military stages. As soon as Martial had blown out the sixty-one candles on his colossal chocolate cake, Ariel excused himself. Although she was sad to see him head off to a rally at the far end of the country, Marie was relieved. Throughout the meal, her parents constantly badgered him with questions and innuendos. In such moments, which have multiplied in recent months, even Marie is unable to ascertain whether the Leclercs’ intention is to punish Ariel for his federalist convictions or rather to influence his decisions regarding Quebec. Either way, their efforts have been unavailing. Regardless of how he feels about their arguments, Ariel inwardly seethes at being lectured to by his in-laws.

  Late in the evening, Marie muses on her childhood woes, which roll across the wooden floor of her room like faded marbles. To return to Saint-Roch is to once again drink a concentrated dose of the painful loneliness that for Marie is at the root of everything. She swallows a sleeping pill; Frère Jacques twitches his paws, chasing in a dream a prey that outruns him. The sound of resonant snoring reaches her upstairs room and prickles her skin like the kiss of an incipient beard.

  With her head buried in a flattened pillow, she takes a deep breath and wedges her hand between the box spring and the small, sagging mattress. She finds her stuffed monkey stuck to the warped spring box. Endlessly petted, clutched, kissed, soaked with tears, and dressed in useless clothes meant to shield it against bad weather, its synthetic fur is as rough as an old woollen sock. Marie strokes the squashed toy, which has lain hidden under the mattress for nearly two decades, but she does not extract it from its hiding place. When, half-asleep, she finally lets go, she has the fleeting impression of hearing a cloth heart beating through her pillow.

  Oddly enough, it was a long time before they realized they had both been adopted. Marie, haunted by her origins, preferred to wait before broaching the subject and kept the truth sealed inside her chest. As for Ariel, his sense of belonging to the Goldstein family was so powerful that he rarely gave any thought to the fact he had been born elsewhere, welcomed into the world by unknown hands, which had passed him on to someone else like a baton in a relay race that was to lead to as-yet-unseen heights.

  It was when they first ran off together to the country, to the crude cabin that had belonged to the Leclercs for generations, that they became aware of how similar their paths were. The coincidence did not entirely surprise them. It explained the extraordinary understanding they shared from the very first moment. Marie, who had read extensively on the topic, knew that adopted children often befriend each other spontaneously, sometimes without having the slightest idea of their own origins. Their fractured beginnings lead them to one another, as though guided by a melancholy horse.

  “How old were you when you found out?”

  “I was eight, I believe. A boy in my class had asked me why my parents had red hair, while mine was brown. When I asked my father, he told me everything.”

  “You’ve never wondered who your real parents were?”

  “No. I have no memories that don’t involve the Goldsteins. I was only a few days old when they took me home. I may as well have been born there. What about you?”

  “It’s a blur. The things I remember, I probably imagined them. I was four when my parents told me where I came from. The next day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. For a long time I believed there was a connection between the two events.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Not at first. They told me my mother was a teenager when she gave birth, and too poor to take care of an infant. The explanation seemed to make sense. But growing up I began to question it. And I envied Rachel for being a biological child.”

  “Do you still envy her?”

  “No. But I wish I looked like her. I’ve always felt I was the one blot on the illusion of the perfect family.”

  “Well, I’m very glad you don’t look like a field marshal.”

  Marie smiles at her lover’s teasing play on her father’s name. Something tells her her father would appreciate it.

  “And you? Do you know who your birth mother was?”

  “No. I only know she was Jewish, because it was important to my parents to maintain the heritage.”

  “And here you are with a shiksa, threatening to break the lineage.”

  “My darling, I’m afraid both of us are disrupting the purity of our lineages.”

  They laughed as they embraced inside the quilted sleeping bag that the mosquitoes still managed to get through, their skin damp and their limbs welded together. In the mossy woods, among fallen trees, they were a nest of warmth and desire. At some point the moon dropped its chiselled reflection onto the perfectly smooth lake, and all at once Marie rose and dived in, her white body summoning the nocturnal fish and making the luminescent algae dance from the surface all the way down to their hidden roots.

  For days he has been gripped b
y a wild urge to work in the garden. The rain comes down like shards of glass, the ground shrivels up from the cold, November has injected a sterile venom into the air, nothing could grow or even take root in the ground, but Ariel is obsessed with the idea of plunging his hands into the soil, of turning it over and planting rows of lettuce and tufts of chives. This is the incongruous image that emerges on the screen each time he places his fingers on the keyboard to edit a watered-down speech.

  His body feels stiff as he stands up and walks over to the rain-streaked window. The outside world is blurred, unintelligible. Cancelled. Ariel starts to weep. A first since the campaign was launched. Until now he has suffered from searing headaches, been assailed by frightful cramps and plagued by bouts of sweating that seemed to sheathe his skin in molten metal, but despite all the stress and frustration, he kept the tears at bay. Tonight, however, with election day looming and the final push just a few hours away, the inner anger that has spurred him on gives way to something new. Disappointment. A gust of wind lashes the window with a spray of rain and Ariel recoils.

  A muffled noise ripples down from the second floor. Among other fabulous qualities, Marie’s feet, when moving over a wooden floor, have the ability to produce the sound of a brush on raw canvas. The note whispered at the beginning of the world. He listens to the delicate rhythm approaching until it sweeps down on him. She wraps her arms around him and he feels somewhat ashamed. She is the one who for weeks has endured his campaign. Through no choice of her own, she has been photographed, shouted at, caricatured; reporters have analyzed her hairdo, her outfits, her way of smiling at the elderly; they have dissected her elocution, her education, her family. She is the one who can’t sleep, who gorges herself on tranquilizers and stands around next to him during public appearances. And now he’s the one crying.

  “You’d think we were about to be drowned.”